Obama 2004: Bush Rushed Legislation Through Congress Without Allowing Time to Read Or Debate

A heretofore "unknown" 2004 interview with Barack Obama by leftwing radio host Randi Rhodes has just emerged. And basically, as you shall hear, Obama is saying do as I say, not as I do. In this case he was referring to quickly forcing legislation through congress. As you can hear in this interview, uncovered by Naked Emporer News, the hypocrisy seems so massive that it is destined to go viral on the Web. It features Randi Rhodes back during her Air America days interviewing then senator-elect Barack Obama on November 22, 2004. And despite the fact that Randi is currently pretty well hidden from public view, you can be sure she will soon be talked about again because of her inadvertent exposure of incredible hypocrisy on the part of Obama. And what was the hypocrisy? His complaint that the Bush administration was rushing legislation through congress without giving the legislators time to read the bills or allowing for much debate.

To get the full flavor of the Obama hypocrisy, be sure to listen to the YouTube clip which also includes a video of MSNBC's Chuck Todd discussing why Rahm Emanuel felt the need to Rahm, I mean ram, legislation through congress. Here is the transcript which picks up at the 55 second mark:

BARACK OBAMA: ...When you rush these budgets that are a foot high and nobody has any idea what's in them and nobody has read them.

RANDI RHODES: 14 pounds it was!

BARACK OBAMA: Yeah. And it gets rushed through without any clear deliberation or debate then these kinds of things happen. And I think that this is in some ways what happened to the Patriot Act. I mean you remember that there was no real debate about that. It was so quick after 9/11 that it was introduced that people felt very intimidated by the administration.

The YouTube clip then segues to comments made last March by Chuck Todd of MSNBC describing Rahm Emanuel's rationale for rushing legislation through congress:

CHUCK TODD: And a few things that I feel like that I've picked up from these guys. Number one is that they are very aware. Rahm Emanuel is Chief of staff...had experience in the Clinton White House. And he is trying to learn every lesson from those days of Clinton and apply it to Obama. So number one is, don't deal with just one big issue. One of the reasons why, for instance, they thought health care went down is you had one issue sitting out there when Hillary Clinton introduced it. We all focused on it in the media. And the opposition got to organize and stop it. And you can kill anything in this town if you set an idea out here long enough and give the opposition time to organize and stop something. And I don't care which side of the aisle you're on. You can kill anything in Washington doing that. And I think they're attacking it this way: saying we're going to push 3 or 4 different things. Because they believe the opposition won't have time to unite and kill all of it.

So kudos to Randi Rhodes for exposing the massive hypocrisy of one Barack Obama although she wasn't aware of it at the time. And why is it that it is once a blog, and not the MSM, that has dug up this very revealing interview?

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